AIB official who spent decades moonlighting as a barman loses dismissal claim

A tribunal has upheld the sacking of a bank official who spent decades moonlighting as a barman “pulling pints” in a Dublin pub only to lose both jobs in a year after a senior AIB manager read about his unfair dismissal from the bar job in a news report.

The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has rejected complaints under the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 and the Redundancy Payments Act 1967 by lending manager Alan Ecock in a decision published on Tuesday.

The bank served notice of termination on Mr Ecock, a week after he won nearly €25,000 in December 2023 for what the WRC found in a separate decision to be a “heartless” and “completely unlawful” unfair dismissal from Kavanagh’s Pub in Stoneybatter, Dublin 7 earlier that year.

He had started work at the bar, run by the Peacock pub family, as a lounge boy in the 1980s, and kept working shifts after starting work in AIB in 1994, the tribunal was told in that case.

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Lawyers for the bank told the WRC last year that Mr Ecock had categorically denied in May 2023 that he was still doing bar work when he was questioned by his managers as part of a disciplinary process that led to him being issued with a final written warning.

Giving evidence In September 2024, Owen Murtagh, the head the mortgage lending unit where Mr Ecock worked, described reading a news report on Mr Ecock’s first case before the WRC in October 2023, which had referred to Mr Ecock as a “bar manager or bar person” in Kavanagh’s.

“He’d previously told us he was collecting rent on Fridays and Saturdays for the Peacock Group and receiving €50 or €60 a week for diesel,” Mr Murtagh said.

Mr Murtagh said that when he first questioned Mr Ecock first about the October 2023 news article, the complainant insisted it was “incorrect”, again denied working as a bar manager, and remarked that he felt there was a “witch hunt” against him.

Mr Ecock continued to deny having any paid work at the bar until “the very end” of a subsequent formal meeting on 25th October, 2023, Mr Murtagh said.

The complainant then went on to refer to his debt rating as “grade 2B”, the hearing was told – a rating Mr Murtagh said could only be found out by accessing internal bank systems and was meant to be “internal to the bank”. That was only allowed “when there’s a business need”, he said.

The witness referred the matter to the bank’s special investigations unit, which found Mr Ecock had used the bank’s system to access his debt profile on 11 occasions, he added.

The bank’s later decision to dismiss Mr Ecock was based on internal investigation findings that he gave “false and misleading” information about his involvement with the pub business and for accessing the bank systems, the tribunal heard.

Mr Ecock’s evidence was that he had taken out a number of mortgages to invest in property at an early stage in his career, and had been “encouraged” to enter into debt by “very senior managers” in AIB, who had approved his loans.

“At the peak, I owed the bank €1.3 million – 23 times my income, now you’ll get three to four times income. The bank trusted me,” he said.

Although his immediate colleagues were unaware of his after-hours work, he said his former managers knew about it and that the bank had approved loans for him on the basis of the additional earnings.

“I lost my job of 26 years; I lost my pension and everything that goes with it ... I wanted this to go away – it didn’t go away. The issue is, I lied, yes I lied. I was proud, I was trying to protect my family, protect myself, and get on with my job,” Mr Ecock said.

“Still, to this day, I don’t think I done anything untoward, I just tried to better myself. I didn’t rob the bank, I didn’t falsify documents. All I did was try to better myself and provide for a better future for my family. If I got it wrong, I got it wrong,” he added.

In his decision, adjudicator John Harraghy decided that the bank’s belief that Mr Ecock had misconducted himself was based on “more than reasonable grounds”.

“Given the continued failure of the complainant to provide an honest explanation ... I find that the sanction of dismissal was proportionate,” Mr Harraghy wrote.

“I find that the complainant’s contribution to his dismissal was enormous,” he added.

“Given his extensive tenure, it is remarkable that he continued to deny the facts regarding his other employment and his access to the internal system,” he wrote. He dismissed Mr Ecock’s complaints.